Wildcats not concerned with preseason polls

Defending champs picked No. 6 for second straight year

Kansas State coach Bill Snyder cracks a rare smile during Monday's Big 12 media days in Dallas. Snyder's Wildcats were picked sixth in the preseason media poll, but he doesn't get caught up in projections, noting "It's precarious trying to make those kind of decisions until the season gets started."

DALLAS — Underestimating the success of Kansas State’s football team has become an annual ritual.

K-State was picked eighth in the Big 12 Conference in the 2011 preseason and ended up in second place, and last year it won the title after a sixth-place projection.

Again slotted sixth in the 2013 preseason media poll, the Wildcats pay little heed to voices outside their inner sanctum.

“We don’t read blogs, and we barely watch ESPN,” Wildcats linebacker Tre Walker said Monday at Big 12 media day. “It’s not about where they place us, it’s about where we choose to be. We choose to come in Saturday after Saturday and play our best and win football games.”

Still, the Wildcats can’t help but use their projected positioning as a motivational tool.

“We do,” center B.J. Finney said, “but coach (Bill) Snyder always tells us to control what we can control. Obviously, we can’t control that, so we focus on what we can improve upon and how we can get better, and we’ve had the success that we’ve had.”

Snyder views polls as somewhat of a necessary evil, just another part of the game’s landscape.

“I said last year if given the opportunity I would pick us 99th, and as I look at it right now as we stand I would echo the same thought,” Snyder said. “It’s precarious trying to make those kind of decisions until the season gets started.

“It’s a difficult task, and I know it has to be done. I certainly couldn’t do it, and I’ve declined so many times to be on coaches’ polls in regards to selecting the top 25 in the country because it is so difficult to do. Even during the course of the season it becomes difficult to pick winners and losers and that’s why people make so much money in Las Vegas, I guess.”

The Wildcats have proven to be a safe bet the past two years, compiling a 21-5 record.

“Sometimes the odds aren’t going to be in your favor,” wide receiver Tyler Lockett said. “Most of the times the odds are against us, but that just gives us the mentality that we don’t have anything to lose. As hard as we work in practice and the way coach Snyder tests our mentality each and every day, we haven’t come to work this hard to lose.

“Regardless if we’re picked sixth, eighth or first, we’re going to go out there and give it our all.”

FILLING THE HOLES — Snyder wasn’t directly asked who will be the starting quarterback in the battle between Daniel Sams and Jake Waters, but he mentioned the position in his list of concerns entering fall camp.

“Most of them (concerns) are probably intrinsic things,” he said. “Dynamics of each year are truly different. As far as personnel is concerned, we still don’t have a starting quarterback, yet, and we did lose — depending on who is counting — nine defensive starters.

“We lost some extremely talented guys on offense,” he said, mentioning Collin Klein, Chris Harper and Braden Wilson. “When you lose as many as we did on defense, that can have an impact on your special teams because so many of your defensive players play on special teams.”

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN — Snyder, now the oldest coach in the Football Bowl Subdivision with his 74th birthday coming in October, took a trip down memory lane to his first coaching job a half-century ago at Gallatin (Mo.) High School.

“I was an assistant football coach, assistant basketball coach, assistant women’s basketball coach, assistant track coach, drove the school bus and taught four units of Spanish, which I knew nothing about,” he said. “I made $6,000 a year, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven because I’d never had a paycheck worth very much prior to that.”